john boehner versus the president of the united states. and we want to just look at the sound bites from today and talk about how much of this is posturing and how much of this is sort of revealing a bottom line. let's listen. >> when i came out the day after the election and make it clear that republicans will put revenue on the table, i took a great risk. and then the white house spends three weeks trying to develop a proposal. and they send one up here that calls for $1.6 trillion in new taxes, calls for a little -- not even $400 billion in cuts, and they want to have this extra spending that's actually greater than the amount they're willing to cut. i mean, it was not a serious proposal. and so right now we're almost nowhere. >> -- this should come as a surprise to anybody. we had debates about it, a lot of tv commercials about it. and at the end of the day a clear majority of americans, democrats, republicans, independents, they agreed with a balanced approach to deficit reduction and making sure that middle class taxes don't go up. f